Archaeology and material culture

This outstanding collection of papers documents the quality and quantity of historical archaeology research conducted on the island of Jamaica over the past thirty years. Jamaica offers a significant location for the investigation of the colonial enterprise in the Americas. Beginning with Spanish explorations and conquest in the sixteenth century, followed by British accession in 1655, the island provides the opportunity to investigate the different strategies of European metropoles and the majority population who arrived there against their will. Moreover, because Jamaica remained a British colony until it achieved independence in 1948, it reflects very different experiences from its North American and many Caribbean counterparts that were transformed by European expansionism. From a comparative perspective, Jamaican history is comprised of multivalent landscapes. All of the chapters recognize that historical investigations must proceed at multiple ‘effective’ scales. Matthew Reeves (chap. 10) provides the most specific discussion of this scalar perspective in which he identifies global, regional, community, and household levels of analysis. It is refreshing to read a chapter that discusses the integration of different scales with regard to the sufficient parameters that link them. Although Reeves is the most explicit regarding methodology, all of the chapters recognize cultural, spatial, and temporal scales as reticulate and hierarchical units of analysis. Moreover, they all adopt a perspective in which material remains are given equal footing to historical documents. The chapters embody the synergism of archaeology and history. Introductory and concluding chapters (chap. 1 and epilogue) situate Jamaican history and archaeological research. Three chapters examine the early colonial period. Spanish influences on Jamaica and other British colonies have often been neglected. A detailed account of the early sixteenth-century Spanish sugar industry offers a counterpoint that employs very specific archaeological observations to illuminate the tension between feudalism and agrarian capitalism (chap. 2). Jamaica was the proving ground for underwater archaeology during excavations of Port Royal undertaken by Donny Hamilton and his students at Texas A&M between 1981 and 1990. (Known as ‘the wickedest city on Earth’, Port Royal collapsed into the sea during a catastrophic earthquake in 1692.) Chapter 3 targets wrought-iron tools recovered during underwater excavations to evaluate local practices in the city; practices that are recorded in probate records, but are disconnected from the lived experience. The archaeology of interactions and communication in a public setting among the British colonial merchant class is the focus of investigations at the New Street Tavern in a drier context of Port Royal (chap. 4). The majority of historical research has focused on the British plantation system in Jamaica. Douglas Armstrong (chap. 5) introduces